Happy weekend...

Happy Friday! It has been a very busy few weeks, and I've had so much to write about but little time to do so. Currently, we're enjoying Lake Champlain with extended family, and the air is beautiful and even a bit crisp! Here are a few things that I've loved this week:

• Listening (and meditating) to the beautiful 2009 album "East of Eden" by Taken By Trees. 
• Loving this study on how the brain benefits from walking in nature. Green spaces, for the win!
• Vibing hard with this amazing podcast on mindfulness and opening to your life, featuring scientist and zen maestro Jon Kabat-Zinn. 
• And finally, a quote from Alan Watts on learning to live, truly, in the present:

"The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening."

Weekly Words: "A Sanctuary for Our Souls"

"It took me a long time and a good deal of sweat to understand it — just how much our Earth is a sanctuary for our souls...

...As the gardener creates, so does the garden transform the inner life of its creator. The garden’s cycle mirrors our own growth, complete with floods, heat, drought, infestation; dying, resurrecting, blossoming, blooming, maturing, rotting; bounty, beauty, miracles.

In our deeper psyche we tend to our life’s garden of sorrows and joys. We pull out, cut back, dig up, bury, sow, support, and nourish hoping one day to harvest our life’s experiences into wisdom. Without all this soul/gardening work, our spirits are swamped under the weeds, our creative gifts choked, our true selves unable to flourish."

- Catherine Ann Lombard, "A Communion with the Earth: Gardening and Gratitude"

Weekly Words: "Stand Still"

"Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you."

- David Wagoner